Share this:

He’s disappointed those who believed in him: Obama, here campaigning Saturday in New Hampshire, hasn’t delivered the change he promised. Photo: Getty Images

As the 2012 presidential campaign winds to a close — it’s mostly about Big Bird and binders, apparently — it’s hard to recall the heady days of 2008. But thinking back, things have really gone downhill.

Four years ago, remember, we were told that electing Barack Obama as president would bring about an unprecedented degree of racial healing, and usher in a postracial society to match our new postracial president.

Foreigners would love us — Arabs and Third-Worlders because he was black with an Arabic name; Europeans because he wasn’t George W. Bush.

Bush’s ginned up “War On Terror” would fade away, extrajudicial killings would stop, Guantanamo would close and there would be no more undeclared wars in foreign lands. Our diplomats would be respected, and the world would be our oyster.

At home, the hypercompetent Obama would review budgets line-by-line for waste, fight pork and cut the deficit in half by his first term. We’d have unprecedented government transparency, and a new, post-partisan political style in which rational argument would replace division and name-calling. The drug war would ease, and those nasty Bush-era warrantless wiretaps would cease.

Also, under the enlightened economic stewardship of the Obama administration, the economy would recover, unemployment would be held down and housing would recover.

Well, not so much. And some Obama supporters from 2008 have noticed and are changing their tune. Last week, in the course of an interview about her new book on art history, “Glittering Images,” I talked about this with Camille Paglia, a big Obama supporter in 2008. Now, she says, she’s voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Though she supports some kind of health-care reform, Paglia calls the ObamaCare bill “a Stalinist intrusion into American culture.”

And it gets worse: “I was very excited about him. I thought he was a moderate. I thought that his election would promote racial healing in the country; it would be a tremendous transformation of attitudes. And instead . . . now I consider him one of the most racially divisive and polarizing figures ever. I think it will take years to undo the damage he has done.”

Also, she says, “I am just sick and tired of endless war . . . as well as this Libyan incursion. . . . I don’t understand how anyone who is a fellow veteran of the 1960s could fail to see that Obama is a statist. It’s exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ You don’t want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people’s lives like this.”

Well, I certainly don’t. And I’m sure that many Obama supporters have their doubts, too. Most aren’t breaking ranks as loudly as Paglia. But for those who believed in the promise of Obama in 2008, there has to be a lot of disappointment.

After all, Guantanamo is still open. The drone attacks go far beyond anything done in the Bush years. The Libyan intervention lacked the legislative approval of the Iraq or Afghanistan invasions, and hasn’t exactly turned out well.

And, despite that Nobel Peace Prize (somewhat ironic-seeming, now, after the drones and Libya) foreigners overall don’t seem to like us any better. The warrantless wiretaps continue, with less press coverage.

And, according to The Washington Post, the electorate is more racially divided than it’s been in over two decades.

Meanwhile, “hypercompetence” is hardly the word to use with regard to the administration’s domestic management. The deficit is over $1 trillion again for the fourth year in a row, and Obama’s effort to blame Bush’s “wars on the credit card” doesn’t hold up, since Bush’s deficits during those war years were a fraction of the ones Obama has run.

Though the Obama administration promised that if we passed the stimulus bill unemployment wouldn’t exceed 8 percent, in fact it’s been above 8 percent for nearly the whole of Obama’s presidency. Reports of a housing recovery also seem premature, as prices remain depressed and mortgage applications fall, despite various efforts to gin up demand.

Partisan identification being what it is, most Obama supporters won’t openly repudiate him like Paglia — that’d require admitting a mistake. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find more of them staying home, or deciding at the last minute to vote for somebody else.

Because, all excuses aside, Obama simply hasn’t delivered what he promised. His opponents know that, of course. But, deep down, so do his supporters.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee.